Tales from the Golden City

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Does Anyone Really Know What Time it is?

My husband and I were recently talking about my issues with time. My grasp of time has always been a bit….well…

Yeah, like that.

Let me explain: I work at home. I often do no know what day it is. Not only the date, but sometimes the day of the week.

Now this is a common problem for people who are nearing a certain age, and who work at home. There’s not a lot of stimulus to tell you where you are in relation to the rest of the world. TV is one of the few things that imposes a schedule on me…well, that and taking the dogs to daycare once a week.

I do try. I use Google Calendar. I have a date book within hand’s reach at all times. I have clocks with the day of the week on them. I always try to travel with watches. But I just can’t seem to keep time straight.

And for me, this problem far predates middle age. Let me point out a few shining examples…

1) I showed up an hour late for a Business Law final. It wasn’t because I was sleeping or goofing off. I was studying for the test. I had a clock right in front of me. I had been attending that class for an entire semester and knew what time it started. Nope, I just kept looking at that clock and thinking ‘one more hour to study’… (This did NOT do my grade in that class any good, since it left me with only 30 minutes to complete a 90 minute test.)

2) When I was working as a buyer, I would sometimes show up on the wrong day for an appointment with a vendor. Not weekly, but a few times a year. (There were LOTS of appts to confuse. I would usually go to NYC with 60 or 70 appts planned.) It’s almost as if I don’t understand a date book. My record is showing up a week off schedule*, which the Shah Safari rep just found funny, and since he had a free hour, he showed me the line then anyway. (I was, thankfully, on good terms with most of my product reps.)

3) I missed an entire day of inservice at the beginning of school one year. I thought school started the next day. No, I didn’t have the start date wrong in my head or on my calendar. I just thought I was living in Wednesday instead of Thursday, so I had one more day. ::sighs::

(And no one bothered to call to ask me why I wasn’t there, either, which shows you the real importance of inservice meeting days. FWIW, the district decided not to dock me a day’s pay because I did so many ‘extra duties as assigned’. But it took them the better part of the school year to reach that decision. Bureaucracy.)

So when I ran someone’s guest blog posts a week early recently, I felt stupid. I had it on the right day in my calendar, which is two feet from my hand. I was just mentally living in the wrong week. I thought it was already June when it was still May. ::headdesk::

All I can ask is that people be forgiving when I screw something up. At least I’m far more likely to do something Early as opposed to Late.

I wonder is there’s a name for this…or if I’m the only one…

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*This is why I LOVE e-mails, which give me a paper trail to double check, as opposed to the old days when we had to do things by phone.